Pirelli HangarBicocca presents ".... the Illuminating Gas", the largest exhibition ever created by Cerith Wyn Evans, conceived as a harmonious composition in which light, energy and sound offer visitors a unique synaesthetic experience. Twenty-four works, including historical works and new productions, are arranged in the exhibition spaces of Pirelli HangarBicocca in an elaborate score.

Cerith Wyn Evans (Llanelli, Wales, United Kingdom, 1958; lives and works between London and Norwich), among the most acclaimed British artists of the last decades, embarks on his career in the alternative London scene of the late seventies and early eighties. A pupil of artists John Stezaker (1949) and Peter Gidal (1946) at Central Saint Martins and later a student at the Royal College of Art, where he graduated in 1984, Wyn Evans stands out at the beginning for the creation of experimental short films. Starting in the 1990s, the artist abandoned film production and dedicated himself to creating sculptures, installations, photographs and site-specific or performative interventions.

His research focuses on language and perception and is characterized by the use of ephemeral elements such as light and sound, the use of editing as a compositional technique and the imaginative potential of the word, as well as the centrality of the dimension temporal and the concept of duration in the use of a work.

Cerith Wyn Evans with his practice often puts in place processes of transformation, declining a learned baggage of quotations and references in completely new forms. This operation takes place through the use of textual materials that, taken out of context, are translated into a luminous language: for example in the form of pulses in Morse code, as happens in the famous series of Chandeliers, of neon writing or fireworks.

In a more concealed and less direct way, the artist also interprets the diagrams that represent the movements of the actors in the Japanese Noh theater, transposing them into sculptures, and recalls in his works the imaginary of historical artists such as Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) and Marcel Broodthaers (19241976). In their elegance and formal balance, the works draw on a complexity of references and quotations - literature, music, philosophy, photography, poetry, art history, astronomy and science - that transmit the culture of the twentieth and twenty-first century as a dynamic system to be deciphered, questioning our notion of reality.
Through an investigation into perception, language and communication, Wyn Evans highlights the evocative power of art and its ability to create collisions between different meanings, often questioning the boundary between the visible and what cannot be seen by eye naked, between material and immaterial.